Undergraduate students from all disciplines present variety of research projects ranging from vog and

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa presents its annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, "Symposium 2003: Presentation of Undergraduate Research and Creative Projects," on Saturday, April 26, from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the East-West Center‘s Hawaiʻi Imin International Conference Center, where more than 70 UH Mānoa undergraduate students will present their research and creative projects for the academic year. The daylong event will consist of poster and oral presentations by the students, and a luncheon will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. featuring distinguished guest speaker Dr. Cynthia Hunter of the Waikīkī Aquarium.

Project topics range from rocket technology, volcanic emissions, and the learning of honeybees, to Muslims in Hawaiʻi, Cambodian beads and representations of race in the popular Harry Potter series. Students from a variety of undergraduate disciplines are participating, including English, history, finance, mechanical engineering, psychology, geology & geophysics, anthropology, information and computer science, political science, economics and more.

Though a majority of the students are from the UH Mānoa campus, there are students participating from other UH campuses. Steven Clegg, a geology major at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, will be presenting his research that analyzes the utilization of a new ultraviolet correlation spectrometer, FLYSPEC, to identify specific sources of volcanic emissions and to sample sulfur dioxide emission rates from the volcanic plumes at the Kilauea Volcano caldera. Kawailehua Kuluhiwa of Maui Community College will present an analysis of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program, which is a cooperative effort between NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Air Force that utilizes data and telescopes located on Mount Palomar in California and at the Maui Space Surveillance Site on Haleakala.

This year‘s symposium includes a special feature with a performance at 1:30 p.m. by the UH Dance Ensemble in Keoni Auditorium. The UH Dance Ensemble is a group of scholarship students from the UH Mānoa Dance Program who hail from all across the United States, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as from right here in Hawaiʻi. For this special presentation, Izumi Sato will perform Bharata Natyam, a traditional dance form from Southern India that is characterized by dynamic contrasts, complex movement, and intricate facial expressions, and Ben Arcangel will perform a dance from West Java that enlivens a character from an Indonesian epic. The movements of capoeira, a Brazilian martial arts form, and modern dance merge into a duet performed by Kelly Del Rosario and Wayles Haynes, choreographed by graduate student Jennifer Butler. The group is led by Gregg Lizenbery, director of the UH Mānoa Dance Program, and Peggy Gaither Adams, director of the Dance Ensemble, who has contributed the exuberant program finale, "Jumpstart," which will feature slaps, claps and stomps that will initiate high-energy rhythmic games.

Following the performance, awards will be presented for the oral presentations and the poster presentations. One grand prize award will be presented for the best talk from each session, which will include speakers from a variety of disciplines. The awards for posters will be presented by category — humanities/fine arts, social sciences, and sciences/engineering.

For more information about the symposium and a detailed schedule of presentations, visit http://undergradsymposium.higp.hawaii.edu.

Highlights of a few of the research and creative projects to be presented:

· Carolyn Berger, Global Environmental Sciences and Political Science major, UH Mānoa -- "The Range of Microbial Biomass Concentrations of Hydrothermal Plumes at Guaymas Basin and Endeavour Ridge, Juan de Fuca" — A study of the bacteria populations in the warm, mineral-enriched seawater of these two hydrothermal plumes.

· Beverly Javier, Social Work major, UH Mānoa -- "Addressing the Bereavement Needs of Children: A Study in Peer Support Group Intervention" — A quantitative, exploratory study examining demographic information from Kahi Hoolana, a children‘s bereavement support program sponsored by Hospice Hawaiʻi, to discover and investigate the relationships, if any, between variables such as age, ethnicity, and/or support systems as they relate to symptoms disclosed upon enrollment of grieving children.

· Malia Noyes, Psychology major, UH Mānoa -- "Delay of Reward in the Learning of Honeybees" — Several experiments exploring the role of delayed rewards in the learning of honeybees, with their performance in an array of learning experiments showing their similarity to the learning of various vertebrates despite their independent evolutionary development and different nervous systems.

· Heidi Sakuma, English and Journalism major, UH Mānoa -- "The Best that Money Can Buy" — A semi-autobiographical creative writing project based on the author‘s experiences as well as interviews with other private high school graduates, "The Best that Money Can Buy" follows two girls through their senior year in a fictional Hawaiʻi college prep school and examines the private school culture that insists that students attend colleges and universities on the mainland.

· Chun-Hoe Jim Wu, Travel Industry Management major, UH Mānoa -- "Online Reservation System: Impact on Intermediaries" — An examination of the way by which online reservation systems have had an impact on various types of intermediaries, i.e. third-party dealers authorized by hotels, car rentals, or airlines to sell services on their behalf. The project reviews the types and significance of intermediaries in the hospitality industry before and after the introduction of online reservation systems.